The world is being shaped by three power blocs: the USA, Russia and China. Their politics look very different, but I argue in this video that they have something profound in common. They are all built on division.
America's founding constitutional promise of equality was never universal. Marxism defines justice through conflict between classes. Neoliberalism claims wealth is merit and poverty is failure. All these systems end up privileging some people, excluding others, and turning difference into justification for domination.
That is not sustainable. If we want a stable world, we need a politics of inclusion, not exclusion. We need a politics of care. And we need the world's “middle states” to embrace it, because good ideas are the only real counterweight to imperial power.
This is the audio version:
This is the transcript:
I want to put an idea to you. Neoliberalism, Marxism and America are all built on the basis of division, and that is the problem that we are facing in the world right now.
Now, what follows is going to be a bit of a simplification of a quite big idea, but bear with me because I think it's worth talking about a big idea in this way precisely to draw out the fact that we are facing a major challenge in the world at present and there is an underlying theme to the challenge between the three power blocks that exist in our world at present, which are focused on the USA, Russia and China, all of which are built on the basis of social exclusion. When we need a politics of care and inclusion, that is the problem that we face, and that's what this video is all about.
Those three major powers now dominate our world. We can't pretend otherwise. The USA is clearly trying to dominate the whole of the Americas. Russia clearly wants to defend its own space and potentially expand back into parts of Europe, and China, whilst sitting on its own at present, and not appearing to directly threaten anyone, is a major world power, and we don't know for how long it'll sit quietly.
Each was created by its founders, and they were created states because two are Marxist and one was created as a result of the division of the USA from the United Kingdom - each was created to serve its people. That was the foundational claim of those who put in place the current forms of government that each of them has. But something has gone badly wrong. What is the common thread that has gone badly wrong? It is division.
Let's look at the States, first of all. If we look at the Constitution, the claim is that all men are created equal, but they forgot to mention women, and they forgot to mention slaves, or black people, or Hispanic people, or quite a lot of other people, come to that. The Constitution promised justice, accountability and balance, but equality was never universal. The Constitution was, let's be blunt about this, about white male power right from the beginning, and that issue is still tearing America apart today. That's the whole foundation of everything that Trump is doing.
Now, let's look at the Marxists. Marxism, supposedly, dominates thinking in both Russia and China. Both of their revolutions, in the last century, were rooted in Marxist communism, and there is no doubt that Marx cared about working people. Let's not bother to argue about that. The whole issue of improving their well-being was what motivated him. And he had very good reasons in nineteenth-century England to be angry about the state of the working class, and he wasn't even alone. Read Charles Dickens, read Anthony Trollope, and they saw this too. The idea that there had to be major reform was one that gripped social reformers.
Those who created these revolutions had legitimate grievances, therefore, about the way that working-class people were being treated in the societies that they sought to transform. The trouble was that Marxism, just as is the case with the American Constitution, has a fatal flaw built into it. It involves rights for some, but not for everyone. The argument in Marxism is that the proletariat should be favoured, and the bourgeoisie should be hated. And you can't build a unified society around a philosophy that is based on hatred.
Division is fundamental to Marxist ideology, and just like America's founding divisions, this has become the thing that has undermined the whole delivery of justice in any of the countries that have followed this logic.
A pattern is clear. It's emerged in all three states. They've all been built on division, and as a consequence, some people are acceptable, and others are not. And this is not accidental; it's built into their design.
Division is fundamental to all extreme political thinking, in fact. Lines might shift over time, but the foundational flaw is always there. Government by exclusion in this way cannot work.
Now, let's be clear. I accept policy differences, of course, it's right that people should have differences of opinion, and they should be respected, but what I reject is a politics of division; that's anathema to me.
We need a politics of care, which respects everyone in a community, whoever they are, and whatever differences they have. This is fundamentally different from what the Founding Fathers sought in the USA, and on the basis of which they wrote the US Constitution. And it is fundamentally different from the basis on which Marxist societies have been built, which do quite clearly seek to prejudice some, the old bourgeoisie.
And this problem of division is still present in UK society at present because inclusion does not really exist in this world, in this country, at this time, and the UK penal system shows that. Prisoners in UK prisons tend to come from poor backgrounds. More than that, they tend to have very high rates of neurodivergence. They are punished for being different. We need to include and not exclude; therefore, and this requirement is one that we need to embrace.
Neoliberal order is based on division as well. Wealth equals merit. Being poor equals failure. The divide has festered; it has destroyed everything of value. Neoliberalism doesn't work anymore. We've been talking about this on this channel, and we're going to be talking about it again, because it's quite clear we have to replace this. We need a new philosophy, and the new philosophy has to be inclusion, and not division.
This is how we build something better. This is the only foundation for a sustainable society that I now believe we can have. Everything else we've tried has not worked; that is why the three world superpowers we have are in deep trouble.
Outside those superpowers, and the vast majority of people in the world are outside those superpowers, people want and aspire to something better. In those middle states, which is the term that Mark Carney, the Prime Minister of Canada, has used to describe the countries that are not the USA, Russia, or China, there is a desire to stand up to power because the governments of the countries in question want their people to have opportunity. They don't want to be beaten down. They know they could be beaten down by these powers.
Therefore, they want and need new ideas because new ideas are the only way in which we can defeat the hegemony of the three empires, the Russian Empire, the Chinese Empire, and the US Empire, all of which are seeking to exploit the rest of the world for their own advantage. And the advantage of good ideas is that, ultimately, they beat bad ones. The politics of inclusion will beat the politics of exclusion. The politics of care will beat the politics of division.
This is the direction in which we must travel now. This is the idea that the world now needs. This is the basis of what we must build. The politics of care provides us with the opportunity to have a new world.
We haven't really tried it. Our three world powers are built quite deliberately on the fact that they deliberately divide their societies, just as they deliberately want to divide the world.
This is no longer sustainable in a world where we know we are all connected, where we know we share common resources, and where we know we have interdependencies on which we literally must rely.
The politics of care is the only way in which we can go forward, but the challenge is for the middle states of the world to embrace it, to use it as the basis of their common challenge to the threat that they face from the societies that still embrace division, and they are called Russia, China and the USA.
What do you think? There's a poll down below.
Poll
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You missed an option from your poll:
Humans vs Nature
That division, and the belief that nature can be controlled and dominated, is the root cause of all the problems we face as a species. We are part of nature and the web of life that we have destroyed through the course of our “civilisation” is absolutely necessary for our survival. The mass extinction event we seem to have started will be the end of us.
[…] challenge the power of the USA, Russia, and China, all of which are inherently divisive societies, as I discuss in today's video. The question, once again, is the cost: it is going to be […]
Worth making the point that with all ideas, ideologies & constitutions that they are based around the underlying social mores of the period.
While there is a lot of interesting and radical talk going on in the English Civil War I am sure that all the talk of liberty didnt include women.
By comparison I understand that the German constitution was amended 50 times between 1949 & 2003
John – you might find this interesting – https://www.olivercromwell.org/wordpress/articles/did-the-civil-war-and-its-aftermath-to-1660-offer-any-lasting-new-opportunities-to-women/
If the answer is largely, No, it wasn’t for lack of effort! Some real gems in there, I hadn’t a clue about women solicitors for example. When I lived in Dorset, our local big house Kinston Lacey was seat of the Bankes family, whose matriarch Mary stoutly but unsuccessfully defended Corfe Castle against Cromwell. Some interesting stories about women in radical religious groups – but the overall picture was that from 1660 onwards, it was back to normal for a couple of centuries, even in progressive circles.
For me it’s always wealth v poverty. Inequality poisons our democracy. The higher the gini coefficient the less democratic a country is.
I think your fundamental point is sound, Richard, and I back you all the way. The framing of it in this video, though, may be somewhat counterproductive. The unifying part of the systems you foreground may be better expressed as authoritarian. In each case, the legislatures have been either captured or more likely created by elite groups who determined they knew best how to govern and that the inclusion of the populace in determining direction and policy was to be avoided at all costs.
While I have some differences with Marxists they are nonetheless pushing in the same direction and inclusion would suggest we need to find commonality with as many people as possible to build a critical mass. Similarly, many Americans would support the constitution, not because it has built in white male supremacy but because they interpret it in a more modern way.
All man-made institutions will be imperfect even with heightened awareness of the tendency to exclusion we are prone to. What we need are mechanisms for change that are incremental and provide a space for people to reflect on their own prejudices and be prepared to see the flaws in their previously fiercely-held beliefs and this is, I feel, only possible when we ditch oppositional politics and adopt a more consensus-based way of decision making.
Noted
My question is, why not do something better?
I am reading “Greek & Roman Political Ideas” by Melissa Lane (superb) & came across J.A.Hobson who in the early 1900s produced “Imperialism” (much influencing Lenin). Hobson’s Wiki entry is interesting – sounds a bit like Mr Murphy in an earlier life & many of his ideas and critiques are reflected in blog entries.
Indeed, critiques of imperialism are +2400 years old, reflected in the works of Plato (echoing Socrates). Very old territory, begging the question – why do humans keep making the same mistakes?
Hibson was unknown to me and looks to be fascinating. Thanks
I haven’t voted because I can’t vote for all the options. All operate in all cases, but in varying amounts in different times and places. And “inclusion” brings up the question — how far should we tolerate the intolerant? If people threaten to kill me for my ideas, should I accept the risk and continue to tolerate?
I can’t answer the poll as I think they are all involved! I always felt that the far right and far left were each grim and destructive, picturing the ‘wings’ of politics stretching round the equator of a moon, the tips meeting on the dark side. It is good to read analysis on this. Abby Innes has compared the economic systems of neoliberalism and USSR, and concluded that religious adherence to their economic models led to similar problems.
Your analysis expands on my simple observation that inclusion/exclusion and using the system to keep people in place and punish them for their their situation or identity are common to both. It is not exclusive to these two systems. Empires, fuelled by extraction, have come and gone as they run out of fuel. I have been fascinated to read accounts of societies with different values and organisation, which are mutually supporting, but they all seem to be small-scale.
I’m seeing the politics of care as a large-scale framework to support and regulate, to look after people and planet, and supporting smaller-scale community endeavours where people do things that work for their locality. Frame sounds rigid; but maybe like a Mecano set, it can be altered to suit but is still the same thing. The core is care for all and sustainability.
A side note on prison populations – I guess the system catches those it is designed to catch, while many people evade what we might see as justice because they can pay for the rules to be formed to allow their pleonexia, or because they employ others to do their dirty work.
Thanks
There is the obvious and much mentioned point that Marx cannot be blamed because the USSR and China say that they are/were ‘Marxist’ even though they are/were actually bureaucratic dictatorships and one party states.
It has been said that Marx didn’t mean ‘dictatorship’ (of the proletariat) in the modern sense, but as sort of emergency magistracy in the Roman sense – being temporary and to cover the transition to ‘communism’. He notoriously didn’t really analyse how that might happen and how a ‘communist’ society might actually work. But he was surely correct in citing the ownership of the means of production as key to the development of capitalism and to its impact on the general population who were dependent on selling their labour.
We seem to be facing the ultimate version of capitalism (Peter Thiel’s ‘post-democracy’, run by a network of global corporations) – we are increasingly dispossessed of autonomy , owning less and less – and ‘renting ‘ more and more ‘services’ from the corporations .
Surely, to institute a caring society – we have to wrest power back from from the global billionaires, and we can begin to understand how that might be down through using your analysis as to how the economy works.
Much to agree with.
Marx was guilty of not thinking through the detail, and of getting some of it wrong.
I am not saying that means he was always wrong. I am saying the delivery has been as I describe it.
There is much discussion on the YouTube comments for this video, in particular around the idea that Marxism can be equated with neoliberalism. The discussion is on the whole reasoned and thoughtful (ignoring the obvious trolls). It’s clear that Marxism means many different things to different people, and even dyed in the wool Marxists (of which I am not one, by the way) disagree on which of Marx’s ideas still have relevance. But there can surely be no doubt that Marx is still relevant.
I acknowledge that your introduction emphasises the simplification of these ideas, but I agree with Richard Bergson above that the framing could be counterproductive.
Marxism has become a catch-all epithet used by the right to denigrate anything left of centre, and I think it’s essential not to play into this dishonest framing.
I will havbe to disagree.
That there is a use for social democracy is certain. For the divisiveness of Marxism, I doubt. But that does not mean Marx’s ideas are not useful. His ideas and Marxism are almost as unrelated as Christinaity and Jesus.
And my framing was very deliberate, and considered.
As a non student of Marxism who had a Trotskyite Catholic son sharing our house for 20 years, I’ve always felt Marx did quite good analysis of his contemporary industrial urban capitalist context, but was weak on solutions.
And factionalism is awful. Divide and rule is an amazingly successful way to defeat your enemy.
The apostle Paul used it when he cried out in the Sanhedrin that he was on trial for believing in the resuurection of the dead. That got the Sadducees & Pharisees at each other’s throats and took the heat off him for a while (he had been a Pharisee).
Division and factionalism is as much part of conservative religion as it is in politics, especially on the left.
I used to feel comfortable with the identity of “broad-evangelical” Christian, now I identify as a follower of Jesus, with a conservative theology and progressive politics, and feel more integrated as a result.
We are going to have to be passionate & pragmatic to see off the fascists – we dont have to compromise our principles, but we will have to prioritise. We wont get everything in one go. Some things we need yesterday and are not really negotiable others will take time and negotiation.
Some P words for the politics of care:
Passion
Principles
Pragmatism
Pluralism
Priorities (People, PR, Planet, Politics of Care)
Thanks
And for the record: Marx was good on analysing the problem. He was right: capitalism has the seeds of its own destruction built into it. The problem is in the remedies: they were little thought out and it has shown.
I am in the minority, who voted for option 3 – Race and Identity. I’m assuming Identity encompasses religious and other social opinions.
I remember back in the USA how fast things went downhill when abortion was brought into the political mix. Suddenly THAT was the issue that everybody glommed onto …and it was the only issue that mattered to many people. Politicians immediately adopted pro or anti abortion positions, and that determined, to a large extent, whether they got elected or not. It didn’t matter what else these politicians also promoted—abortion was the decider.
How can you tackle wealth versus poverty, nationalism or class warfare framing when the basis of voting boils down to single issues like abortion—or immigrants, or racial/religious differences, sexual orientation, gun control etc? We all have seen these issues determine the outcome of elections. How meticulously politicians must edit how they speak about their position regarding these issues!
That’s why I voted for Race and Identity as being the most damaging and certainly the most noisy division we are dealing with today. Social media has exacerbated the situation, with its headlong dash towards unreliable and downright fake, emotive stories that grab headlines. Good government requires smart, attentive voting, and we’re well on the road to wrecking any possibility of that.
Interesting – thank you
I follow your argument and support your politics of care. Could this be achieved by focusing on building a sustainable world? To be achieved by implementing what is being advanced by Nicholas Stern in his book ‘The Growth Story of the 21st Century’
In part, definitely, yes
Conflict is at the heart of all great storytelling – which contributes to the powerful and persuasive ideological foundation of the Marxists and Neoliberals. Contesting them requires equally powerful storytelling – something best done with a clear and identifiable ‘villain’. If we want an alternative, successful narrative, like it or not, we need to identify a singular, familiar bogeyman, and build a story around why our vision of the correct way to be in the world contrasts with ‘his’.
You do not beat division with division. You beat it with inclusion.